


Unfinished Business

by semele



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She looks in the mirror to reaffirm, and she sees herself exactly as she is: her name is Kate Pickens, she's twenty seven years old, and eight months pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfinished Business

_I looked in the mirror, but something was wrong.  
I saw you behind, but my reflection was gone.  
There was smoke in the fireplace as white as the snow.  
A voice beckoned gently “Now it's time to go”.  
A requiem played as you begged for forgiveness.  
“Don’t touch me!” I screamed,  
"I’ve got unfinished business." _

White Lies, _Unfinished Business_

 

If she has a girl, she'll call her Anne. Anne is a good name, short, comfortable, and so easy to use.

(So easy to hide, hide in the crowd of Annes. One more, one less, who will notice the difference?)

She never came up with any name when she was first pregnant, it just didn't seem that important at the time. But now people ask; she knows they'll be asking as soon as she starts showing, so she comes up with an answer. Might as well think of a name now, since in a few months, she'll have to do it anyway. It's easier this way.

Katherine has always been amazing at adapting.

It's funny how people nowadays get attached to babies, she thinks as she looks at bright, colorful shelves in shops. Not quite like she remembers it, but then, maybe she remembers it all wrong, her memory altered by shiny documentaries and those all-knowing history books. Maybe it was just her who didn't get attached, who was scared out of her mind, confused, surrounded and alone.

(Maybe she just wasn't built for this.)

***

When she goes for her check-ups, she gives a fake name out of habit. 

“Do you want to know what you're having?” asks the doctor, and Katherine nods without thinking. She can't imagine not wanting to know, when so often knowledge can make the difference between life and death. Knowledge is leverage.

The doctor mistakes her eagerness for something else, and smiles an easy smile that makes Katherine want to compel her. 

“Here, see?” she continues, gleefully oblivious to her patient's intense stare. “It's a girl!”

The words sound wrong in English, strange and false, but Katherine still freezes as if she heard a ghost. She relaxes her back before the bubbly doctor can notice any change, takes a deep breath and automatically tries to rest her hand on her stomach.

Anne it is.

***

Katherine isn't an idiot, and she knows when she's being followed.

“I saw your sister this morning,” says a chatty lady from the grocery store round the corner. “Dear God, she looks just like you! Is she staying for long?”

“We aren't sure yet,” says Katherine with her most lovely smile, and continues picking her vegetables. Balanced diet is important, or so she's heard recently, so she buys lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes. Her body is an asset, and she needs to keep it in shape.

Sometimes she thinks she remembers that they didn't have tomatoes when she was first pregnant, but it seems so unreal she lets go of the thought quite quickly.

Elena leaves a pair of baby shoes at her doorstep, all frilly and ridiculous, exactly the kind of shoes anyone would expect of her. When Katherine picks them up, she knows what she's supposed to say.

“They're from your niece, she has the worst taste,” she should tell Anne, her palms resting flat on her stomach. “You know, you had a sister once, a long, long time ago. She was taken away from me, and I never spoke to her, but now, with you, I'm going to do it all right.”

Except Katherine knows better than to speak to people who can't talk back, better than to speak in hallways, better than to speak at all. She opens the door as if nothing happened (keys held close to the chest), throws the shoes into a random drawer, puts on some music, and starts chopping up tomatoes.

(The music is quiet enough for her to hear the warning sings in case she had to run.)

***

It's funny how easy it is to pretend that Elena isn't around, that she doesn't dance around Katherine's flat like a ghost, compelling her an easier life. Everything is taken care of, just like old times; sometimes Katherine really misses the special brand of simplicity that came with her previous life.

On some level, it's annoying to have someone around all the time. It makes Katherine aware of just how silent she is, always expecting eyes and ears (to be fair, there usually are some). Of course in the past, she's had more troublesome spies than Elena Gilbert, sharper and more efficient, with much more complex agenda.

The truth is, Elena Gilbert is like an open book, and Katherine got bored of it after more or less two chapters.

She tells herself that it's because of Elena that she doesn't talk to Anne. You should talk to babies, Katherine is sure she read about it in some magazine or something, and the only reason why she doesn't is that she doesn't want to be overheard. She has secrets she'd never share with Elena, words, and thoughts, and fears that need to be protected.

“You're my unfinished business,” she says one night despite Elena's vampire hearing, or maybe because of it.

Sometimes she wonders how much she'd say if she were alone (wonders how much she will say once she's left alone), and more often than not she actually has the courage to admit she doesn't know, not for sure.

Thankfully, she doesn't have to know.

***

Three months pass before she opens the door and barks: “Come on in,” the phrase feeling odd on her tongue.

Elena steps over the threshold tentatively, not sure where to look and how to act, and for a second her thin frame looks so unfamiliar it makes Katherine feel just a little bit unsettled.

She isn't exactly sure when everything freezes, but next thing she knows, they're standing face to face, watching each other just like they did when they first met. Finally Katherine moves to break the awkwardness, sits in her favorite armchair and pours two glasses of juice, how freakishly domestic.

“Why did you want this?” asks Elena quietly, and Katherine knows she still can't take her eyes off her huge body, which is only fair, really. Elena is twenty seven now, no, Katherine stops in her thoughts; she herself is twenty seven, and Elena is eighteen. She looks in the mirror to reaffirm, and she sees herself exactly as she is: her name is Kate Pickens, she's twenty seven years old, and eight months pregnant.

(She is five hundred and forty six years old.)

It's important to remember who she is.

“Do I need a reason?” she asks with a shrug, and lets Elena stare some more. It's only fair, she figures; if the roles were reversed, she'd probably be staring as well.

(She did stare, in fact, and she tries very hard not to remember a tired, tired girl from 1689; a distorted, fifteen-year-old mirror with bad hair and swollen ankles. Klaus never knew that doppelgangers came and went like fireflies, and Katherine met them all, at least until 1689. Then she stopped looking.)

Katherine can tell that Elena doesn't like her answer: she doesn't like that it's true, or maybe she simply doesn't like what she sees. Maybe she just doesn't know what to do with the surprisingly unfamiliar body right in front of her, so human, sweaty, and changed.

(Maybe she doesn't like to see the doppelganger line continued, anticipates generations of girls she'll have to look after from afar. Anne might be Katherine's, but those that come after her will be Elena's. In some strange sense, even Anne belongs to Elena just a little bit; no more than to Katherine, of course, but so much more than to any father Katherine could've chosen.)

“I never wanted to have children,” says Elena sharply, and Katherine, startled into honesty, finds herself saying:

“I did. I think I always did.”

Okay, so maybe there are things about Elena she doesn't understand that well.

“I'm due in August,” she says impulsively.

When Elena answers: “I can see that,” what Katherine hears is: “I will. I promise I will.”

***

When Anne is born, and Katherine, still a bit groggy, tries to deal with paperwork, she almost writers, under _Name_ : Elena.


End file.
